Shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025.
Denise Levertov described Gillian Allnutt's poems as 'at once hard and delicate, like wrought iron'. They are both serious and light in touch, deeply humane and spiritually profound, showing the spirit surviving amongst the tatters of Christianity in a modern wilderness.
The lode in Gillian Allnutt's title picks up on two of the many meanings of the word. A lode can be a course, a way, a journey; also a road, a lane. Her collection traces a journey through time, the time of her own life and of our lives, since the Second World War. Lode also means guidance, here the guidance afforded by the continuity and relative stability economic, cultural, spiritual of Britain's postwar years, the setting of the first part of the book. That sense of stability ended with the Covid pandemic, which Gillian Allnutt lived through in the former coal-mining village of Esh Winning in Co. Durham, England, her home for the past 30 years, the landscape of much of the middle section of the book.
The poems in the book's third part, Earth-hoard, are raids on the new Unknowable, drawing on the habitual resources of the old known world, informed by spiritual traditions, especially Christianity; by English literature; and by the old habit of writing about a natural world now threatened as never before.
Table of Contents:
POSTWAR
12 Audience
13 Corbridge
14 refugee born London 1949
15 Dunstanburgh
16 a place beyond belief
17 Berthe
18 Crabapple moon
19 Poem for John Clinging
20 Pink Jenkins
21 Private Passion
22 Flame-thrower
24 My father, mislaid
25 note
LOCKDOWN
28 Golden Saxifrage
29 On having to leave York University without the clock
30 Azuma Meditation
31 The Walk (allowed)
32 If these days should be final
33 My Garden in Esh Winning
34 Lockdown
35 The way she remembered it
37 To be honest
38 At 71
39 Marney’s Boots
40 Mask
EARTH-HOARD
42 ‘Wouldst thou witten thy Lord’s meaning in this thing?’
43 At Ware
44 Beechwood
45 of the trees in the wood by the old pit line
46 summertime
47 Germander Speedwell Veronica chamaedrys (Linn.)
48 Do the birds worry?
49 Solitude
50 The Song of Arachnid
51 My hands, yes
52 I love this poor earth for I have known no other
53 Trist
54 dark night of the soul
55 Footnote
56 Afternoon in the Garden
57 Found Poem
58 Flâneur
59 for only then can
60 Sea Change
63 Notes
71 Roughage
About the Author :
Gillian Allnutt was born in London but spent half her childhood in Newcastle upon Tyne. In 1988 she returned to live in the North East. Before that, she read Philosophy and English at Cambridge, and then spent the next 17 years living mostly in London. From 1983 to 1988 she was poetry editor ofCity Limitsmagazine. Her collectionsNantucket and the AngelandLintelwere both shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize. Poems from these collections are included in her Bloodaxe retrospectiveHow the Bicycle Shone: New & Selected Poems(2007), which draws on six published books plus a new collection,Wolf Light, and was a Poetry Book Society Special Commendation. Her most recent collections areindwelling(2013),wake(2018), and Lode(2025), which was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize 2025. She has also publishedBerthing: A Poetry Workbook(NEC/Virago, 1991), and was co-editor ofThe New British Poetry(Paladin, 1988). From 2001 to 2003 she held a Royal Literary Fund Fellowship at Newcastle and Leeds Universities. She won the Northern Rock Foundation Writer's Award in 2005 and received a Cholmondeley Award in 2010. Since 1983 she has taught creative writing in a variety of contexts, mainly in adult education and as a writer in schools. In 2009/10 she held a writing residency with The Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (now Freedom From Torture) in the North East, working with asylum seekers in Newcastle and Stockton. In 2013/14 she taught creative writing to undergraduates on the Poetry and Poetics course in the English Department of Durham University. She lives in County Durham. Gillian Allnutt was awarded The Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry 2016. The Medal is awarded for excellence in poetry, and was presented to Gillian Allnutt by HM Queen Elizabeth in February 2017.
Review :
Her writing roams across centuries, very different histories and lives, and draws together, without excuse or explanation, moments which link across country, class, culture and time… Her poems progress over the years to a kind of synthesis of word-play and meditation. In her work the space between what is offered and what is withheld is every bit as important as what is said. She has the power to comfort and to astonish in equal measure.
Gillian Allnutt’s spare, elegiac poems are like runes on bone; messages from another world... There is rich thought compressed within these poems, where spirituality is all the more telling for its quiet capacity to surprise.
wake…is a contemporary pilgrim's progress, confronting doubt and the cruelties of the world both now and in a historic perspective. She travels the border between this world and the world of the spirit, combining the two in radiantly-spare poems, beyond-haunting, yet grounded in the moment.. a profound examination of human experience in language both searing and serene.
